


The Construction of Stories

by bricoleur10



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Discussion of Death, Friendship, Gen, Mentions of past drug abuse, One Shot, References to Torture, Spoilers for Revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 04:10:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3343166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bricoleur10/pseuds/bricoleur10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coda to the Season 7 episode “Epilogue” After Reid admits to his afterlife experiences, Rossi asks him who Tobias Hankel was, and what happened to him in Georgia. They talk about living, dying, drugs, and telling stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Construction of Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Reid/Rossi friendship story, though it can be read as pre-slash if your goggles are adjusted correctly. Could also be read as background Morgan/Reid slash if you feel like it (I usually do).

**The Construction of Stories**

“So who’s Tobias Hankel?” Rossi’s question comes in a false swirl of ease and comfort. 

They’d just returned from the multiple drowning case in California, and while Reid hadn’t actually thought much of his revelation beyond making it in the moment and how it would affect their catching Chase Whitaker, the others had latched onto it, as any functional family would do to a thing that was thought to be causing one of its members pain. 

Morgan had tried to talk to him on the jet – even apologized for making a mockery of what he had, at the time, not believed to be true.

_“Most neurobiologists theorize that while visions had during death experiences are often aided by physical surroundings – the lights and doctors in a hospital, like you said – it’s also much more complex than that. Human beings are hardwired to believe in a post-life mythical paradigm. Even if someone identifies as atheist or agnostic, it’s imbedded so absolutely into our culture that it actually affects the development of the brain. There’s also the physical side-effects of a body and mind shutting down.”_

_Morgan had looked at him, unsure and a little relieved. “So you don’t believe that what you saw is…unexplainable?”_

_“I believe that what I saw can absolutely be explained within the confines of current scientific understanding.” He pauses deliberately, wanting to make a point, even if he’s not sure which one anymore. “It’s what I felt that I have a hard time reconciling.”_

He and Prentiss had tried to convince Reid to come out with them after the jet had landed. “Good food, good drink, maybe even a stimulating conversation with a member of the fairer sex?” Emily had nudged his arm, trying with her actions to apologize for dying all those months ago. 

Reid had smiled at their banter. “Thanks, guys,” he’d said, “But I kinda just wanna go home.” 

There had been some hemming and hawing, of course, but eventually they’d left without looking too worried about him. 

JJ had gone a different route. “You haven’t seen Henry in a while. He misses you.” 

This one was easier to defer. “And you miss Will. Go home, JJ,” he’d insisted when she’d tried to interrupt. “I’ll come by this weekend if you want, but I am _not_ intruding on your first night back with your family after over a week away.” 

JJ had accepted this was a small nod, a bright smile, and kiss on his cheek – a show of fondness that caught Spencer off guard both physically and emotionally. He’s been getting better about stuff like that – accepting touches and bodily shows of affection from his team. 

_“Positive physical contact is imperative for healthy development in almost every species, certainly every mammal. It promotes pair-bonding and a sense of companionship that can, in our line of work especially, be instrumental. It also releases oxytocin and other endorphins and is shown to reduce the rates of many common illnesses.”_

It’s always some variation of that speech when he unintentionally flinches away from contact. _“No,”_ he’s saying, _“I’m not against it in theory, I just spent my formative years afraid. Scared of classmates twice my size wanting to hurt me, terrified that from one touch to the next my mom will forget who I am.”_

Science is easier, but he’s been getting better. 

Garcia had been witness to the first two failed attempts. She hadn’t been in California to hear his confession, but she had found out about it all the same. Morgan or JJ, probably. It doesn’t matter now. He’d tensed some at her approach; she, oftentimes more than the others, can be ruthless when she’s got it in her head that one of them needs to deal with something. She doesn’t have to follow the same rules the rest of the team does. She doesn’t have to not profile them, even if, to her, it’s not profiling at all. She calls it intuition and knowing them. 

She’d stopped right in front of him and smiled. “Letting it get to you. You know what that’s called? Being alive. Best thing there is. Being alive is all that counts.” 

Reid had let out a palpable breath. It’s not often at all that Garcia is the easiest one of them for Reid to deal with, but when she is, it’s a level of ease that none of the others can match. 

“The universe is big. It’s vast and complicated and ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles.” He’d responded after considering it for a moment. 

She’d lit up at his words, grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Be good, Spencer.” 

She’d disappeared then, floated out of the office with the contentment that comes with knowing someone you care about is going to be okay. 

“You believe in miracles, Reid?” Rossi had sounded surprised. 

With each interaction Reid had been getting closer and closer to his intended destination; at Rossi’s, he’d been approaching the elevators. 

“Not especially,” he’d answered honestly. “I believe that for all its constant advancements, science still fails to explain certain things, and in between trying to understand those things and being forced to deal with them, it’s in our natures to give them a name. Miracle comes from the Greek _thaumasion_ and the Latin _miraculum_ —as that which causes wonder and astonishment, being extraordinary in itself.”

“Something we can’t explain.” Rossi had said. 

“Yes,” Reid had agreed. “But it also incorporates a deeper supernatural connotation which often causes the source of the unexplained to go unquestioned as something purely divine.” 

“Well, thank god for scientists then.” Rossi had said. Reid had smiled, because sometimes Rossi talks in a way that reminds him sharply of his mother. 

“So,” the older agent presses the button for the elevator. “Who’s Tobias Hankel?” 

Reid is genuinely surprised at the question, and lets it show in his features. “Hotch didn’t tell you?” 

“Hotch talks less about the team’s personal issues than he does his own.” Rossi says, which isn’t a direct answer, but “I didn’t ask him about it.” is. 

Reid nods a few times, watches the elevator floors count down. “He was a man who brought me back to life once.” 

“Yeah, I deduced that much from what you said in California, genius.” He’s teasing. When Rossi teases him it always feels a little bit familiar, and that shouldn’t make Reid feel guilty, but it does. It does because a part of him still wants it to be Gideon here. He hates that impulse and ignores it the best he can. 

That’s another one of those things that he’s been getting better at. 

The elevator pings and they enter it together. They’re six floors to ground level, seven to the parking garage, though Rossi doesn’t press the button for that. Reid wonders how much of this he can say in that time. 

“About eight months before you joined the team, there was a case in Georgia. Two unsubs were killing couples in affluent neighborhoods. One would call the police right before the murders and they’d both be gone by the time police arrived. Garcia figured out that he was spying on people through the cameras on their computers. I figured out that there was actually a third unsub.” Reid talks about this like he would talk about anything else. It’s not hard yet, because this part of the case hadn’t been hard. 

“A pack,” Rossi looks surprised. “That’s usually an unbreakable dynamic.” 

Reid smiles, though he’s not exactly amused. The elevator stops moving and the younger man isn’t surprised, because you always feel like you’ve been on an elevator longer than you actually were. _Velocity and altered momentum_. Or maybe it’s because of that time he and Derek had almost died on one. 

“I parked in the lot across the street,” Rossi gestures when they get the lobby, explaining why they hadn’t gone down to the garage, anyway. “If you want a ride home.” 

Reid doesn’t, really. He likes walking and he likes public transportation. But Rossi wants to hear the story. Reid can’t blame him. It’s a pivotal story to their team’s history, and one that Reid had honestly thought the older man had already been told. 

He nods and shrugs at the same time, and follows Rossi. They exit the building and the weather, the light breeze that’s just starting to border on cold, changes the dynamic of the moment. 

“JJ and I went to interview a suspect. A man who had called the police to report someone trespassing on the first victims’ front lawn. When we got there, he denied having ever made the call.” Reid huffs. “It was stupid of me to have not figured it out sooner.” 

He stuffs his hands into his coat pockets, and though he knows it’s impossible, a sense memory, he can feel the pressure of a needle at the crevice of his left elbow. 

_“You should be left handed.” His mother had said to him once. “Why aren’t you?” He’d been seven and unable to answer the question. That night, he’d researched it. It’s the first memory he has of reading to find an answer._

“He was one of the unsubs?” Rossi asks, though it’s not really a question. 

“He was the only unsub,” Reid corrects. “Well, physically. There were three, we’d been right about that, they were all just…inside the same person.” 

“Dissociative Identity Disorder?” Rossi lets out a long breath. “That’s…rare.” 

“Its diagnosis rate is less than one percent of the general population, though some statistics have the untreated number at around seven percent.” Reid shares. “And even then, fully formed alters are atypical, and usually a manifestation of extreme physical and psychological abuse. Tobias Hankel had been hurt like that, by his father. After he killed him, after Tobias killed his father Charles,” Reid clarifies, when he notices that he’d been avoiding saying the names, “his personality split, as a way to cope with what he’d done and what was done to him.” He pauses, considers not including it, but it’s critical to the profile. “He was also an avid drug user. A type of heroin. That contributed, too.” 

“So you and JJ unwittingly stumbled into the den of a madman,” Rossi summarizes, and he makes it sound like a story. That’s comforting to Reid. Comforting in a way that Gideon never had been, in a way that the rest of the team can’t be. 

Rossi is a writer. He’s a profiler and an FBI agent, and maybe even a war veteran, first; but he’s also conclusively, irrefutably, a writer, too. Just like Diana Reid had been – still is, because that’s something that even a degenerative mental illness can’t take away. 

Maybe Reid should stop feeling guilty about missing Gideon when Rossi’s around, because it’s growing more and more obvious that Rossi reminds him nothing of the father figure he’d never had before Gideon, and everything of the mother figure Diana had tried to, but couldn’t always, be. 

Funny, the joke has always been that Hotch is their mother. 

“A psychotic man.” Reid corrects. “ _Madman_ is a phrase that has positive mental associations for me.” 

“That’s troubling.” Rossi comments, half-joking. 

“A madman with a box,” he smiles and shakes his head. “It’s a…it’s a nerd thing. Ask Garcia about it.” 

Rossi calls him _nerd_ affectionately. Same way he does to Garcia and Kevin Lynch. It’s hard for Reid to associate that word with anything less than negative, but he tries. It makes the older man look pleased in this moment, anyway, and that’s a lot. 

“Is that what you two were quoting at each other in the hallway earlier?” 

Reid should probably have to think about his response for longer than he does, but he has an eidetic memory, and what he needs to say comes to him easily. “There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

Rossi is quiet for a moment. They stop at a crosswalk and the older man uses that an excuse to study Reid’s profile. There’s something to be said for the fact that they call seeing half a person’s face seeing their profile, Reid thinks.

“Is that what made you come to the FBI?” 

“That’s what Gideon said to me the day I decided to accept his offer and join the BAU.” Reid says, though he knows it’s not an answer. “It was strange to me, that of all the literature in the world that he could have quoted, any of the best, most poetic phrases that have ever been transcribed, that he chose that one.” 

“He was trying to show that he knew you.” Rossi suggests. He’d known Gideon, of course, long before Reid had. Different experiences color perceptions. “In a different way than your professors and classmates had known you before.” 

“He was trying to appeal to my need for comradeship.” Reid agrees, though it’s not as easy. “It worked.” 

“Do you resent Jason?” Rossi asks. 

Across from them, the light turns green. 

“I understand him, and I understand why he left.” It had taken a long time, but Reid has, if not somewhat recently, come to terms with this. “I know who he was to me and what he wanted to be and what I meant to him. Life keeps going, and we’re stronger for it.” 

They cross the street in silence. 

“What happened with Tobias Hankel?” 

Reid takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. He can still smell burning fish hearts sometimes.

“JJ and I split up. Which was my decision, and a bad one.” He remembers the bite on her arm, and being told, weeks later, about the dead dogs. “I found Charles Hankel, he was one of Tobias’s alters, in the cornfield around back. Or, I guess, he found me.”

“He hurt you?” Rossi is prodding gently, almost like he thinks everything that had happened, happened in that cornfield. Which can’t be true, because Reid had said _“I was in a shed,”_ earlier. 

“He kidnapped me. Kept me,” he swallows, won’t look at Rossi, “for two days. Well, for forty-three hours, give or take a few minutes, but Morgan calls it two days.” 

“He tortured you.” It’s a logical mental leap to make from what Rossi already knows. Reid nods, glad, in this moment, to not have to say the word. “How bad?” 

“I’m still here.” Reid offers. 

Rossi stops them right outside the door of the parking structure with hand on Reid’s arm, just below the bend of his elbow. His right one, though, so it doesn’t make him panic. For a long moment Rossi’s eyes search his. It’s an intensity that Reid usually doesn’t experience outside of certain moments with Derek, and as uncomfortable as it is, it’s also…something that isn’t quite bad. 

“I’ve known men who were held as prisoners of war for less time than that and never fully recovered.” Rossi says, and though they’re not the words Reid had been expecting, they are ones that make sense. 

Perceptions colored by experience. “Did he…did he make you choose? Who would live and who would die?” 

Reid inhales sharply. “I thought you didn’t know.” 

“I don’t, kid,” He says gently. And usually only Morgan calls him _kid_ , but Rossi just had and Reid doesn’t hate him for it. “It’s what the insurgents did sometimes. Psychological warfare.”

“I didn’t.” If he closes his eyes he can still see it. The computer screens. “I wouldn’t. I chose someone to live, though. I-I had to. It was the same thing, the same outcome.” He clears his throat. “I differentiated it as a way to cope in the moment, and it worked…but it was all the same.” 

“Life and death are very different.” Rossi argues. His grip on Reid’s elbow tightens marginally, but it’s a pressure comfort, nothing resembling pain. 

“That’s what the psychologist that Hotch made me see said.” Reid remembers that, too. Remembers answering the questions just right – _not too recovered, not yet, but not broken. Clearance to rejoin the team by meeting three. No red flags._ – and going home after and getting high. He’d still had Tobias’s dilaudid then. It hadn’t felt real to him, hadn’t felt like an addiction or doing anything wrong, until he’d sought it out on his own. Found a _dealer_. That had made him a common junkie. The only thing in his life, perhaps, that he’d ever done _commonly_. “‘By choosing a life to save instead of choosing a life to end, you remained true to who you are’.” He quotes. 

“You didn’t believe that?” 

“I believe that someone died.” Reid clears his throat, uses his left hand to push some hair away from his face. It’s a tell, he knows that, but he can’t stop himself. “I also believe that her death wasn’t my fault. Or Tobias’s. It was Charles and Raphael.” 

“The third alter was…an archangel?” Rossi looks perplexed. Quite suddenly, as if just realizing it was still there, he takes his hand off of Reid’s arm. 

It makes the younger man feel cold. 

“A mediator between father and son.” He nods, and crosses his arms. “Religion played a fundamental role in making Tobias what he became.” 

“Coulda guessed that.” His chuckle has a bitter quality to it. “So…two days. I assume there was physical torture, along with the psychological?” 

“He beat me.” Reid looks over the older man’s shoulder. Three men in suits are getting into a rental car. Two of them are in a romantic relationship, but the third is unaware of it. Sometimes being a profiler is a little bit like being a magician. 

“To death?” 

“That part was harder for the others, I think.” Reid says honestly, because he’s thought about this from every angle, sober and not, and come to this conclusion over and over again. “I was dead – seeing bright lights and feeling an inexplicable warmth –” he huffs. “The others had to watch. On the camera Hankel had set up. Watch me die, think that I was going to stay that way. Gideon, Morgan, JJ, Prentiss, and Garcia. They all thought I’d never come back. JJ would have blamed herself, still does for us splitting up, even though it was my call.” 

“That…that had to’ve been rough on them.” Rossi acknowledges. He nods a few times and then, bringing them back to their surroundings, gestures to the door they’re still standing in front of. “I’m on the third level. Wanna walk?” 

Reid pushes the door open and enters first. He doesn’t mind the steady incline or the echoing silence. Woods in the middle of nowhere don’t even bother him that much anymore, though the team still tries to shelter him from them sometimes. Given the lack of consistency, though, Reid thinks that their moments of protectiveness are more about _them_ than _him_ these days. 

“Do you ever talk about it?” Rossi asks. “The details, I mean.”

Reid seriously considers whether or not he wants to answer that question honestly. Of the twelve steps of recovery, Reid had skipped a lot of them. Some days he doesn’t believe that his decision to exclude the others from his progress had hindered him too greatly, other days he remembers that it had taken him two years, four months, and two weeks to get his one year medallion, and he feels like a failure.

It had been Gideon’s responsibility to help him, Reid knows that all of the others had seen it that way, and that was why their involvement in his addiction had ended at keeping it a secret. They’d done that to protect him, because they’d known he would have spiraled if he’d been forced to leave the BAU, and also because for as messed up as he was back then, he never let cravings interfere with their cases. 

His interactions with his team, yes, sometimes (he’d spent months apologizing to Emily in little and big ways), but never in the field. He was still the best, the smartest: their prime resource. 

In his darker moments, he’d thought that maybe they’d stayed quiet just so they wouldn’t lose him as a commodity. 

“Reid?” Rossi prompts, and the younger man realizes that he’d been lost in his thoughts. 

“Sorry,” he apologizes. All of that is behind him now. Maybe not far enough to not still be a threat some nights, but certainly far enough that he should feel safe talking about it. 

One step at a time. 

You choose the path. 

“I’ve never discussed the specifics,” he finally answers his teammate. “Could never get the words to come out right. But I wrote it all down. It took a while, but over time…everything I remember, which is pretty much everything that happened, save a few neurologically traumatic moments in between dying and coming back, I eventually got it all down on paper.”

“Writing about it is supposed to help you deal with things.” Rossi says this and sounds proud of Reid for finding a way to cope. “Probably why I’ve written as many books as I have.” 

“No, you write because you’re writer.” Reid says without thinking. “That’s different than writing to help you process something traumatic.” 

“You sound very sure about that.” Rossi comments evenly. 

“My mother is a writer, and I grew up with stories.” He swallows, not realizing how much of himself he’d revealed with that comment until it’s already out. He decides that he doesn’t want to take it back. “My best friend from high school, he’s a musician. There’s something different in the way an artist sees the world. Neuropsychology says it’s about pathways and connections made in the brain, but I think…I think…”

“That it’s one of those things that science, for all its continuous advancements, still fails to explain?” It’s not a guess, and his certainty makes Reid feel safe. 

“I’m not a writer.” Reid says. “For all I know about the classics, I could never create one. That’s why it didn’t even occur to me to use writing as a therapy to deal with what happened to me until someone in NA suggested it.” 

“Someone in…” Rossi looks surprised – Reid sees it in his profile. Quickly, though, he schools that into acceptance. “I see.” 

His gut clenches at the automatic fear that he’d just made a terrible mistake. 

“Do you?” 

“No, probably not.” He admits. “A form of heroin, you said.” 

“I don’t…I’ve quit. It was a long time ago.” 

“Not that long, Spencer.” The use of his first name is jarring, and Rossi had probably done it on purpose. “You said all of this happened eight months before I joined the team? Were you clean then?” 

“Yes, I was when you joined.” 

“And every day after that?” Pinpointing evasive conversation tells, Reid acknowledges. Rossi is a good profiler, an excellent agent, but there’s also something to his demeanor that suggests to Reid that the older man is operating from the basis of personal experience. 

A war veteran, he knows, is thirty-six percent more likely than the average person to become addicted to some form of narcotic. Rossi isn’t an addict, Reid’s pretty certain that he would be able to tell that much, but he probably has a friend, or more than one, who he has, in the past, helped overcome a destructive means of coping. Or a friend he’s lost to it.

“I’m good now.” Reid says firmly. _You always have the power to control the conversation_. “And if I’m ever not…I have places I can go. People who will help.” 

John isn’t someone Reid would have ever thought he’d connect to a situation like this, a statement like the one he’d just made, but it’s his face that appears in his mind’s eye. Ever since he’d approached Spencer at the Beltway Clean Cop meeting all those years ago, John – _no last names or titles, not here_ – has been a sounding board for him, someone to turn to when he’s needed it. 

_“Anything you need, Spencer. I’ve been there. You don’t have to be alone in this.”_ Stereotypically comforting words, and yet the emotion behind them had led Reid to trust their authenticity. Feeling versus knowing. Statistics versus individual experience. 

“But you’re not talking about the team, are you?” Rossi infers. They’ve been walking the third level for a few minutes now, passed several cars that might have been Rossi’s, but the older man is leading them in circles. 

“Having a network of friends and confidents outside of work is a socially acceptable and healthy fact of most individual interpersonal dynamics.” Reid recites, and then abruptly stops walking. “We’ve passed your car twice now.” 

“You don’t know what I drive.” 

“Do you really want me to profile that?” 

Rossi chuckles and concedes, pulling his keys out his pocket and pressing the button to make the car beep. Black, new model Lexus, Reid notes. He would have said navy blue, but other than that he’d been spot on.

“Do I have to tell you that you can always come to us, come to me,” he makes it personal. “If you need to?” 

Reid doesn’t have to think about it. “No.” He says. “I know that.” 

The older agent doesn’t ask if he ever _will_. They both know the answer to that.

“You wanna drive?” Rossi offers abruptly, changing the dynamic of their interaction drastically, from intense and emotional to lighthearted and complete. 

He holds out the keys like a peace offering. Nothing _other_ than a purely symbolic peace offering, he realizes, because the fob Rossi has only needs to be inside the car to allow it to start. 

“Morgan says that letting me drive should be reserved for moments of guilt over religious apathy.” Reid says this factually, going with the changed flow of the moment and also figuring that it’s only fair that Rossi be warned, since he’s never seen. 

The comment, which Morgan himself hasn’t made in years, doesn’t make him think about Tobias Hankel or Charles Hankel or Raphael. It makes him think about _Morgan_. He doesn’t understand sometimes why the rest of the team finds it so difficult to accept that words like that, for him, aren’t dangerous. 

Rossi, in this moment, seems to get it well enough. “Kid, I drove Humvees into hostile territory. _And_ I lived in Manhattan. You’re not going to scare me.” 

Reid shrugs. “Okay, but if Morgan asks, I _did_ warn you.” 

Exactly twenty-three minutes later Rossi’s Lexus jerks to an abrupt halt right outside Reid’s apartment building. Unconcerned with the older man’s harsh breathing and white-knuckled grip on the door handles, 

Reid checks the mirrors out of habit and readjusts the seats out of curtesy. 

“You-” Rossi stares at him with an untamed, somewhat… _wild_ look in his eyes that would probably bother the doctor, if he hadn’t seen it several times before. “Who… _who_ in the _world_ taught you how to drive?” 

“A sixteen year old professional racecar driver.” Reid answers promptly. “I technically wasn’t old enough to legally operate a vehicle capable of going two hundred plus miles an hour, or any motor vehicle, for that matter, but I _was_ smart enough to cognitively understand the aerodynamics and engineering. I was eighteen before I drove anything that didn’t come equipped with a turbo booster, and that was five years after I drove for the first time.”

Rossi stares at him for a long time, mouth opened slightly and still breathing a little heavily. “Get out,” he says slowly, “of my car.” 

“I didn’t do any damage.” Reid protests. “My hand-eye coordination may not be superior enough to make me good at most sports, but it’s perfectly functional for driving, and my unusual experience with cars actually makes me a safer driver than most-”

“Out.” Rossi interrupts, and Reid rolls his eyes but complies. 

People always get so particular when it comes to driving, like there’s only one right way to do it. 

Rossi exits the vehicle, too. He leans against the passenger door while Reid fetches his messenger bag out of the back and then meets him on the curb. “You okay?” He asks, slightly amused. 

“You’re going to kill me.” Rossi says. “I always thought it would be stress related, but no, this…this is…dammit, kid.” 

“That’s pretty similar to what Morgan said the first and only time he let me drive.” Reid nods. “JJ punched my arm. Prentiss had fun, though. She lets me drive sometimes when no one else is around.” 

“Emily is an adrenaline junkie.” Rossi says, and maybe it’s still the effects of being in the car with Reid, but he doesn’t flinch or pullback after saying _junkie_. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe Rossi really does understand, in a way that only a writer can, that the words don’t scare him. 

“I know it’ll never happen again, but thanks for letting me drive.” Reid offers. “The Lexus handles much better than the SUVs do.” 

Rossi looks at him and tilts his head. “You’re welcome.” He says incredulously.

“And also…” he takes a step back, and then forward again, grips the strap on his bag and smiles tightly. “Thanks for…thanks for listening to everything about…well, Hankel and all of that. It’s been a while since I talked about it.” 

Rossi takes a deep breath, the residual effects of Reid’s driving wearing off, and stands up straight. “Thank you for answering my questions, Spencer.” 

The genius nods. “Well, I guess I’ll see you on Monday.” He goes to turn away, but Rossi calls out to him. 

“Yeah?” Reid inquires, not really worried, but unsure of what to expect in this moment. 

“Garcia has a quote plaque hanging in her office. Of all of the doo-dads and whatnots in there, it’s the only thing with words.” Rossi looks at him hard. “Do you know what it says?”   
“Of course I do.” Reid answers honestly. He understands the meaning of these words on every level. “I bought it for her.” 

Rossi smiles, bright and uncontained. “I had a feeling you were gonna say that.” He waves even though Reid is only a few feet away. “Goodnight, Spencer.” 

The younger man exhales and feels like something coiled up in his gut is slowly unraveling. “’Night, Dave.” 

In a darkened office back at Quantico, surrounded by computer monitors and colorful displays of individuality, there rests a singular message carved in stone, placed precariously so that anyone who enters the room will unwittingly absorb its contents:

_We’re all stories, in the end.  
Just make it a good one, eh?_

**Author's Note:**

> All quotes belong to Doctor Who


End file.
